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Procedural Justice and the Fair Trial in Contemporary Chinese Criminal Justice

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Procedural Justice and the Fair Trial in Contemporary Chinese Criminal Justice Governance and Public Policy in China 2.1–2 (2017) 1–92 brill.com/brp Procedural Justice and the Fair Trial in Contemporary Chinese Criminal Justice Elisa Nesossi Australian National University [email protected] Susan Trevaskes Griffith University [email protected] Abstract This review examines the literature on procedural justice and the fair trial over the past two decades in the People’s Republic of China. Part 1 gives a wide-angle view of the key political events and developments that have shaped the experience of pro- cedural justice and the fair trial in contemporary China. It provides a storyline that explains the political environment in which these concepts have developed over time. Part 2 examines how scholars understand the legal structures of the criminal process in relation to China’s political culture. Part 3 presents scholarly views on three endur- ing problems relating to the fair trial: the presumption of innocence, interrogational torture, and the role of lawyers in the criminal trial process. Procedural justice is a particularly pertinent issue today in China, because Xi Jinping’s yifa zhiguo 依法治国 (governing the nation in accordance with the law) governance platform seeks to embed a greater appreciation for procedural justice in criminal justice decision-making, to correct a politicolegal tradition overwhelmingly focused on substantive justice. Overall, the literature reviewed in this article points to the serious limitations in overcoming the politicolegal barriers to justice reforms that remain intact in the system, despite nearly four decades of constant reform. Keywords China – fair trial – governance – politicolegal culture – procedural justice © Elisa Nesossi and Susan Trevaskes, 2018 | doi:10.1163/24519227-12340003Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 03:31:37AM via free access 2 Nesossi and Trevaskes Introduction Rule of law, a complex and multifaceted concept, is central to debates about law and governance in both democratic and authoritarian political systems. Authorities in both political contexts cast it as an ideal of irrefutable impor- tance to the stable governance of a country, creating the framework on which both legislative and justice system procedures are conceived, conducted, and reformed. Crucial in many declarations and political discussions about achiev- ing the rule of law is the right to a fair trial, to protect individuals from the unlawful and arbitrary curtailment or deprivation of other basic rights and freedoms. As a fundamental norm of international human rights law, this right is recognized internationally by authorities as one of the key guarantees of criminal, civil, and administrative proceedings. In common law settings, numerous rights are subsumed under the umbrella of the fair criminal trial, and these apply to pretrial and trial proceedings, appeal, and sentencing. The idea of the fair trial in common law systems was historically associated with the development of constitutional rights. Around 150 years ago, the focus of the fair trial concept shifted from a general com- mitment to improving the trial process overall to one connected specifically with individual rights (Langford 2009). By contrast, in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), because the system draws heavily on a civil law tradition, com- bined with aspects of socialist law (and is ruled by the Chinese Communist Party [CCP]), the party-state’s focus on improving fairness in criminal trials has remained squarely on reforming the trial. The stated motivation is to enhance “judicial justice and efficiency” (sifa gongzheng yu xiaolü 司法公正与效率) of the criminal justice system as a whole, rather than to pursue a discrete com- mitment to protecting individual rights.1 In China, authorities often refer to the reform goal of improving “judicial justice.” According to Chinese scholars, this entails the pursuit of procedural justice as part of the overall aim of facili- tating and obtaining a fair substantive outcome. Conceived in this way, judicial justice embodies aspects of both the concepts that Western scholars refer to as procedural justice and substantive justice, with a definitive emphasis on achieving substantive justice outcomes (Li Y 2003).2 1 For evidence of the importance of “judicial justice and efficiency as guiding principles of judi- cial reform,” see any of the numerous Supreme People’s Court (SPC) Work Reports Reports beginning in the late 1990s. For instance, see the then—SPC President Xiao Yang’s work report to the National People’s Congress in 2001 at http://www.china.com.cn/chinese/law/117201. htm. On the current use of judicial justice terminology in the Xi Jinping era, see Xinhua 2017a, 2017b. On use of judicial justice terminology in official political statements, see Xi 2015. 2 Western concepts of substantive and procedural justice are discussed in more detail in Part 1 below. GOVERNANCE AND PUBLIC POLICY INDownloaded CHINA from2.1–2 Brill.com09/25/2021 (2017) 1–92 03:31:37AM via free access Procedural Justice and the Fair Trial 3 In any modern legal system, crimes are prosecuted on the basis of an understanding that a criminal act is socially harmful. In China, state authori- ties generally assess the nature and extent of harm that can be attributed to a particular criminal behavior in terms of the degree of “social harm” (shehui weihai 社会危害) that the behavior has inflicted—that is, harm not only to the individual victim(s) but also to socialist social relations that may affect Chinese society at large (Lin 1992; Zhao and Chen 2013). In a similar vein, party authorities recognize the political importance of judicial justice because they see that it supports the broad sociopolitical goals of state development and social stability (Wang L 2007). Judicial justice and much of the rhetoric around it concerning due process therefore contribute to achieving the overarching reform goals of modernization and development. This review article draws together key analyses in the Western and Chinese scholarly literature concerning procedural justice and the fair trial in China. It seeks to identify how this field of scholarship variously interprets changes in procedural justice and in the fair trial and rules and rights associated with it in the criminal process.3 Our review period is roughly the past two decades, during which the party-state has begun to reposition law systemically in rela- tion to national governance under the banner of yifa zhiguo—that is, from when President Jiang Zemin first espoused this in the late 1990s to current reforms in the name of yifa zhiguo under President Xi Jinping. Here we observe in the literature that, although norms and practices of procedural justice are drawn into the Chinese justice system, this system is structured for sub- stantive law to enable overarching receptivity to central party-state policies. Because the Chinese regime portrays itself as a dictatorship of the people, the CCP that represents this dictatorship allows the legal system to institutional- ize only the extent of limited accountability that the party deems required by procedural justice. In this context, the concept of a fair trial in China may be understood through the question “fair for whom?” Politicolegal party authori- ties are guided by appraisal of the political, economic, and social imperatives that inform national policy, especially by concern for the country’s social stability, which is influenced by all three and is intrinsic to the party’s hold on governance. Fairness is thus more a matter for the collective than for an individual. 3 This article reviews only first-instance criminal trials, not appeals or procedural justice in the area of administrative punishment. For analyses of appeals, see Kuang and Liang 2015a, 2015b. For analysis of administrative punishment see Biddulph 2017; Biddulph et al. 2017b. On reforms to the criminal justice system to accommodate minor offences after abolition of the re- education through labor system in 2014, see Biddulph 2016, 2017; Biddulph et al. 2017a. GOVERNANCE AND PUBLIC POLICY IN CHINA 2.1–2 (2017)Downloaded 1–92 from Brill.com09/25/2021 03:31:37AM via free access 4 Nesossi and Trevaskes We begin this review with the sociopolitical context that generates and sus- tains the concepts of procedural justice. We are guided by legal scholar Perry Keller’s insightful observation of Chinese socialist law over two decades ago, which remains germane to all discerning studies on Chinese criminal justice today. He observed that what party authorities for decades have perceived as the building blocks of certainty and predictability in law originate not from narrow and formalist expositions of legal rules but from their understanding of the broader ideological context of socialist development. The dominant idea underpinning the operation of China’s criminal law process is “the instrumental use of law and its essential openness to its context” (Keller 1994, p. 754; emphasis added). This means context as perceived, understood, and appreciated by central party authorities. Moves to order and legitimize the criminal trial in the PRC have therefore rested on the dominant party-state understanding of the trial’s utility to the top-priority national agendas, which are connected to state development and social stability and, ultimately, to the stability of the party itself. Given the importance of this contextual lens, we find that the most com- pelling studies of the criminal law process in China situate the development of legal concepts within the sociopolitical context in which they operate. The most insightful studies are those that follow the general spirit of Donald Clarke’s work (2003), which critiques the teleological tendency to see law in the PRC as moving toward a certain predictable evolutionary end—a “thin” or socialist rule of law, for instance. Moreover, we argue that studies that critique China’s justice system using the yardstick of liberal democratic values are equally unhelpful in understanding the nexus between justice and politics in China today.
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